Ramona High School Class of 1970 Senior Class Movie

Butch Cassidy - Sandy Dunbar
Sundance Kid - Paul Hansen
John Wayne - Harvey Manning
Glen Campbell - Kevin Cushman
Kim Darby - Patti Duncan
Katherine Ross - Nadine Myers
Uncle Dan - Dan Faulhaber
Priest - Pat Hanlon
Mourner - Gayle McCreary (uncredited)
Head of "The House" - Diana Smith
Train Engineer - Chuck Larson

Hole in the Wall Gang:
Terry Baggs
Jim Clark
Mike Hovanec
Rick Watts
Larry Young

"Ladies" of "The House":
Lee Bornstein
Gayle McCreary
Nadine Myers
Linda Schaefer (uncredited)
Diana Smith (outtakes only)
Peggy Vanderpool (outtakes only)
Nancy Ballmer (outtakes only)

Boys at "The House":
Ron Brown (uncredited)
Bob Hofer (outtakes only)
Dave Howlett (outtakes only)
Al Lambert (outtakes only)
George Rabito (outtakes only)
... and the Hole in the Wall Gang

Special guest appearances:
Mourner - Sam Crawford ('69)
Mourner - Julie Christinson ('71)

Story - Sue Conklin
Screenplay - Patti Duncan
Photography - Steve Zappe
Sound Technician - Dave Shade (uncredited)

I forget many of the details about the making of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Meet True Grit", but here's what I do remember...

Patti Duncan had a script, which is credited as being written by "Sue Peppas" (who was really Sue Conklin - she got married over spring break of our senior year)... I have no memory of what the script actually looked like. We must have had something, otherwise we couldn't shoot. Or maybe we just made it up as we went...

Remember, this was shot back in the days before video cameras - yeah, at least 10-12 years before them - so we borrowed the Super 8 film camera from the PE department. As I recall, they used it to film football games and stuff like that. From the looks of the final product and the outtakes, we used nine or ten 50' rolls of film, each lasting about three minutes. All were color except one was black and white.

The primary shooting locations were at Fairmount Park, Mount Rubidoux, Evergreen Cemetery at Pine and 14th, and Gayle McCreary's house on Adams Street. We shot some other footage at Ramona in the home economics wing, but those scenes ended up as outtakes, along with other shots meant to burn film so we could get it developed.

Of course, one of the drawbacks of using Super 8 film was that there was no sound. That made splicing the film easy, but how did we add the sound track? After editing, we assembled most of the cast in Room 40 (not everybody in the film could come), sat them down, and ran through the finished film once so they could get an idea of the pacing of the scenes. Then, after rewinding the movie and starting it from the beginning again, we tape recorded the cast dubbing the dialog as they watched the film. Not the perfect solution, but the best we could do at the time. Next, Dave Shade and I took the reel-to-reel tape back to his house and added music to the other track.

Frankly, I don't remember the premier screening of the film, where or when. All I remember was that we had to synchronize the projector and the tape deck to get the sound to match the action on the screen. After that, I forget what happened to the film... I think Patti Duncan kept it - thankfully, we didn't bury it in the time capsule at the front of the campus, or it would have been ruined.

Some time in the late 80's, I obtained the original film and reel-to-reel tape from Patti in order to transfer it to video in time for our 20-year reunion in 1990. I had a sound studio transfer the sound track from reel-to-reel tape to cassette tape, and borrowed a Super 8 projector to perform a really low tech transfer of film to video. Basically, I projected the movie on a screen, and recorded the image to my video camera mounted on a tripod. The colors were all washed out so you could hardly tell the difference between the color in most of the film compared to the black and white scenes in the brothel. Finally, I dubbed the sound track from the cassette onto the video as I played it back. The automatic volume control of the video deck I used back then made for some really annoying humming in the quiet portions of the sound track.

For the original 1990 digital version, I imported the video tape through my digital video camera into my Mac and edited it in iMovie, exporting it out at the original resolution with good compression and sound quality. However, because the original transfer from film to video was a simple projection, it still looked and sounded pretty crappy. I uploaded it to Vimeo in 2008 and shared it on this page

I eventually planned to remaster everything prior to our 40-year reunion in 2010. I sent the original film in for a professional film direct-to-digital transfer, where they cleaned most of the dust and junk from the film, color corrected it, and transferred it so each frame of the original film was captured separately, eliminating the annoying blur of two images in one still frame. After that, I transferred the cassette sound track directly into my computer and eliminated most of the hissing, humming, and other annoyances on the voice track. Because the music was not up to par, I re-recorded the music track as well. Finally, once I got the digital video back into iMovie, I matched critical audio cues with video events to stretch and squeeze the dubbed soundtrack to better synchronize it with the original silent movie. I made DVD copies for each person involved in the film for the 40-year reunion, but the 1990 version remained on this page until 2020.

Overall, I attempted to make this film look a little less amateurish than it really is... I mean, come on - with over acting and hokey dubbed dialog, I still couldn't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. This film will always be the product of what 17- and 18-year olds were capable of doing back in 1970.

Ramona High School Class of 1970 - Senior Class Movie

"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Meet True Grit"

Introduction

Film Credits

Technical Notes